Hovering Over The Back Button

Last week was my first Gilbane conference as a Gilbane analyst, having in previous years only served variously as vendor booth bunny, guest speaker or panellist  and it was great to focus on meeting folks, listening to some great sessions and participating as a moderator and speaker.  Two and a half packed days, that stretched long into the evening  felt like a week and my new resolve to keep my blog posts short, could be tested - but I'm going to stick to a couple of key things... honest. [ read more ]

Jon Marks (@mcboof) has set a challenge to vendors on his blog - to prioritize various elements of what makes a great CMS product, to choose between Editors, Performance, Features, Developers and producing Websites. I know, I'm not a vendor any more - but I started writing a comment and once it got longer than his original post, I thought hang on...

[ read more ]

As a fresh new broom sweeps through my professional life as I transition from years of vendor representation to that of an analyst - I've changed the title of my blog  (and the URL). I'll obviously write more on my move - but more importantly - changing the name of my blog? Why 'Hovering Over The Back Button'? [ read more ]

Last week I was proud to be voted onto the board at CM Pros, to join a pretty new board under the presidency of Scott Liewehr to take this respected community of practice organisation forward. It's something we've been talking about for six months or so and  one look at the industry heavy weights that have been there before gives me an idea of the responsibility ahead for all of us and these are exciting and challenging times for both membership organisations and the discipline of content management. [ read more ]

I think we can safely say that the last two week have been quite lively for Alterian Content Manager, as after an incubation with partners, customers and analysts we took our product strategy and roadmap to the social web. I've tweeted, interviewed, commented, posted and now (finally) blogged our message to the CMS community – I say “we took” but @janusboye certainly had a hand in igniting it. [ read more ]

It was recently reported in New Media Age, picked up by the Hubspot blog that Coca-Cola were moving their campaign sites from "traditional" websites to social media platforms and they are not alone, Pepsi recently created a stir as they announced a move from big budget Super Bowl ads to investing in their social media community. So what does this mean for "traditional" web content management? [ read more ]

Last week I attended the Gilbane Conference in Boston and have finally found a few minutes to blog about it, we exhibited and I was invited to speak in a couple of sessions and as I'd been contributing to the 'back channel' through Twitter (#gilbaneboston) I thought I'd expand on some of the those thoughts. First observation is a personal one - this was the first event  that I'd been to where there were a lot of people that know me through this blog or twitter - and initially it was slightly unnerving having people leap straight into conversation with me and thank you to everyone that did. [ read more ]

Today we embarked on an interesting social media challenge, a few folks that I've started to hang out with virtually (and more recently in the pub) agreed to meet at a designated time in a Google Wave and set about writing a blog post - in an hour. There was no pre-determined title, no prep, just a blank bit of virtual paper and half a dozen scribblers… [ read more ]

I smiled at this the other day -"Software Developers: The New Rock Stars of Marketing" - it comes from the article  'Out of the Box' published a few weeks ago in the UK Financial Times, that talks about the role of technology in marketing in the new media age. The smile is because this is pinned up on the kitchen noticeboard in our Bristol office and that phrase is highlighted (can someone explain why developers always sit nearest the kitchen?). So has the geek inherited the earth? Well, marketing anyway... [ read more ]

CMS bloggers of the world have been double dared again, not this time by @kasthomas, but by Julian Wraith (@julianwraith)- who in this post wants the CMS community to gaze into our crystal balls and speculate on the future of Content Management.I think the Future of Content Management is about people. Is that too predictable, does this mean I am going to wang on about ease of use? [ read more ]